Hack and / - Dr hjkl and Mr Hack

Arrow keys, schmarrow keys—some of the best programs out there let you move around from the home row just like vim intended it.

Mutt

Here's yet another opportunity for me to add one more reason I love mutt as
an e-mail program—it's practically vim's key-binding cousin. In fact, when
you first start using mutt, you'll notice that when in doubt, you often
can just press the same keys you'd use in vi to do something similar in mutt. The
only place you might become confused initially is once you open an
e-mail message
and read it. By default, the j and k keys switch to the next and
previous e-mail message in your folder, even when an e-mail is open, so you do have to
teach yourself to use Enter and backspace to scroll through the body of an
e-mail message.

Netris

Netris is a great command-line
Tetris clone available on most major Linux
distributions. One thing that always bugs me about
Netris is that
although it uses much of the home row to rotate and move shapes in the
game,
the keys are just slightly off from what you'd expect them to be in vi.
Luckily, you can change the key bindings when you start
Netris, so for true
vi keys execute:

netris -k "hkl j"

Doing the above causes h to move pieces left, l to move them right, k to
rotate them, j to make a piece drop faster and the spacebar
to drop a piece to the bottom immediately. My Netris score was much improved
once I could play it like vi.

Firefox

Unfortunately, Firefox doesn't use vi key bindings by default (although
Google Reader does), but it's not surprising that this can be fixed with a Firefox
plugin. The Vimperator plugin (vimperator.org/trac/wiki/Vimperator)
is extensive enough to deserve a column of its own (in fact, send me an e-mail at
lj@greenfly.net, if you'd be interested in that).
Essentially, once the
plugin is installed, your entire Firefox session turns into a modal
vi-style session. Not only can you use hjkl, g, G and so forth to navigate
pages, but also when you are in a text field, Vimperator actually moves into insert
mode! You even can record and play back macros just like in vim. Vimperator
adds a bunch of other features to make keyboard-only Web browsing not only
possible, but also preferable to the mouse. If you are a vim lover and haven't
installed Vimperator yet, I highly recommend it.

As you dig around both command-line and GUI programs, you'll find that a
surprising number of them at least support hjkl, if not more-extensive vi
key bindings. I've listed only some of my favorites here, but the next time you
open a program, press j a few times—you just might be surprised when the
program scrolls down.

Kyle Rankin is a Senior Systems Administrator in the San Francisco Bay
Area
and the author of a number of books, including Knoppix
Hacks and Ubuntu
Hacks for O'Reilly Media. He is currently the president of
the
North Bay
Linux Users' Group.

Kyle Rankin is a director of engineering operations in the San Francisco Bay Area, the author of a number of books including DevOps Troubleshooting and The Official Ubuntu Server Book, and is a columnist for Linux Journal.

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